Information released today by Greenpeace Japan shows that the builders and suppliers of nuclear reactors were afraid of being held financially responsible for any accidents they might cause from the outset of the nuclear energy era in Japan.

But what if a nuclear company is grossly negligent? It needn’t worry. The Commission’s documents say:

“…we decided to delete ‘gross negligence’ to not make suppliers feel uneasy”

We wouldn’t want nuclear suppliers to feel uneasy, would we? But uneasy is the way the Japanese people must be feeling when they see the size of the costs of the Fukushima disaster that they are now having to pay.

And this is a state of affairs that continues to this day.

What this proves is the nuclear industry has never had any faith in the safety of its nuclear reactors. If it did, why would it have worked so hard to be protected from its responsibilities?

It’s an admission that nuclear power is inherently unsafe and that the nuclear industry is not able and willing to deal with a major accident. They’ve known this from the very beginning.

We know who really needs “an indemnification from nuclear liability”. Us, the people, who have to live with nuclear power and all its dangers and who have its massive costs forced upon us. The nuclear industry has put its own interests and those of its shareholders above the people it is supposed to be serving.

The nuclear industry has been allowed to write its own rules for more than 50 years, as the documents we’ve made public show. It’s time those rules were scrapped and the nuclear industry disqualified from the game it’s been playing with all our lives.

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The Atomic Age is an ongoing project that aims to cultivate critical and reflective intervention regarding nuclear power and weapons. We provide daily news updates on the issues of nuclear energy and weapons, primarily though not exclusively in English and Japanese via RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. If you would like to receive updates in English only, subscribe to this RSS.

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Additional Notes / 謝辞

The artwork in the header, titled "JAPAN:Nuclear Power Plant," is copyright artist Tomiyama Taeko.

The photograph in the sidebar, of a nuclear power plant in Byron, Illinois, is copyright photographer Joseph Pobereskin (http://pobereskin.com/)

This website was designed by the Center for East Asian Studies, the University of Chicago, and is administered by Masaki Matsumoto, Graduate Student in the Masters of Arts Program for the Social Sciences, the University of Chicago.

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If you have any questions, please contact the Center for East Asian Studies, the University of Chicago at 773-702-2715 or japanatchicago@uchicago.edu.